Art couple mixes nudes and cement

Quinn has been taking pictures since her childhood, even with cameras that had no film.

It wasn’t until later that she started taking photos of nude figures.

“When I first started to shoot, I shot landscapes, which is the normal step into it,” she said. “But I wanted to do something that would make people feel something. So nudity freaks people out.”

The type of nudity varies. Some are shots of people having sex, while others are more graphic. One features a man with a pierced perineum, the region between the scrotum and anus, and others with people tied up in ropes. She said the amount of fetishes baffles, and in particular the website Fet Life.

“It’s like the Facebook for kinksters,” she said. “People’s profile pictures are quite often their genitals, or their boobs, or something happening to them. I still want to take photos of furries.”

And while the work might provoke reactions in others, for Quinn the reaction has become muted.

“When I am behind the camera, half of the time I don’t even see anything,” she said. “When I was shooting this guy, I didn’t even realize what his piercings looked like till I got home and saw them on the computer because I am more focused on the lighting, composition and all that stuff.”

Mike Woods dons a full-length pair of Carharts, a mask and a nine millimeter to photograph abandoned buildings in Detroit.
“I am just enthralled with the buildings,” he said. “I love crawling through the shit. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”

He started about three years ago when he got a point-and-click camera from his mother. Since then, he’s been discovering unusual happenings in the buildings, such as a 40-foot-long modern boat on the fourth floor of a building vacated since the 50s.
He said he also runs into the occasional tent town.

“There’s a crack dealer in the corner, someone getting blown in the corner — you got 40 people in there,” Woods said. “You just walk through. You don’t mess with nobody, they don’t mess with you.”

And while he’s relocated to Albuquerque, that doesn’t keep him from visiting Detroit three times a year.

“I don’t shoot down here,” he said. “When I go to Detroit, I bum rush the city. I shoot, shoot, shoot, as much as I can.”
Some of his photos feature beautiful women posing nude amid debris. At first, he used to shoot the buildings by himself, but at some point a girl wanted to come along with him.

“She got nude,” he said. “It was her idea, and it came out killer, and everyone was like, ‘That’s so cool.’ I liked it, but I didn’t like having to work with other people.”

However, it was never about the erotic for Woods. It was just a byproduct of his love for the buildings, and as he said, it’s not exactly easy to get people to go with him.

“You don’t shoot models because it’s hard to tell a model, ‘Hey, meet me at this abandoned building in the worst part of town,’” he said. “As long as you get a girl that is with it, it turns out pretty good.”

In the back office of Studio Red, Mike Woods and the “Evil” Quinn, as she goes by, show pictures of seductive women in abandoned buildings and explicit piercings of human genitalia.
He wears a crucified storm trooper shirt. She is in a black jacket that barely hides the length of a colorful tattoo on her arm.

She hardly cringes at a photo of a man’s pierced scrotum. Mike, in contrast, gasps. He said he had a similar reaction when he first saw her art work.

“I was like, man, this is my girlfriend,’” he said, while Quinn flipped through more pictures of erotic photos. “She takes pictures of this stuff. I hope she don’t like it because there ain’t no way in hell.”

Woods and Quinn run DburQue, a gallery that derives its name from the their hometowns: Detroit and Albuquerque.

It started last February when Woods was living in Detroit. He had some work featured in the Dirty Show, an international erotic art exhibit that tours the country. There he met Quinn in Detroit.

She was there from Albuquerque with her 70–year-old father. She said she was probably more embarrassed than her father was, which is why she sent him back to the hotel room while she stayed at the show. From there, she spotted Woods.

“I was looking for someone to bum a smoke off, and he was kind of cute,” she said.

They hit it off, to say the least. He invited her to an abandoned building the next day to show her the sort of work he does. She missed it — she said she slept in — but they went out into the streets of the Detroit, on Valentine’s Day, at 2 a.m.

“I am going out with this guy from Detroit. Here’s a number,” she told the doorman. “If I don’t come back, call it. He must have thought, ‘You are a dumb, dumb girl.’”

She came back at 4 a.m., and then they went on a date to the old packer plant.

The show ended, and it was time for her to leave. She asked him to come back to Albuquerque to check it out. He said he couldn’t afford it, but a month later, Quinn sent Woods a ticket to the city.
“I had never seen a mountain before,” he said. “I was geeked!”
It didn’t take long for them to decide that he would move out there, and from there they decided on creating a gallery.

They named it DburQue, and planned to feature a monthly exhibition from one Albuquerque artist and one Detroit artist.
The couple said they almost had a gallery for their work. They had signed the lease and gotten the keys when the landlord said nudity wouldn’t be allowed in the space.

“We would make it work with some of the stuff, and some of her lamer stuff. Well, not lamer but, you know, tamer stuff,” Woods said. “We had the idea for the gallery, but now we didn’t have the space. That’s when we started the website.”

That was in June, and as of now, the DburQue gallery is only online because of the graphic nature of their artwork.

Their site is split among their work, and they’re still producing new work. The couple brought the radical stage performer Satori Circus to Albuquerque, and they even have some work at 105 Gallery coming up this week. Despite setbacks, the couple is marching forward with their art.

“I mean, you’re talking about one person,” Woods said. “We’re just going to look for a more progressive gallery, like 105, and not have the headache anymore.”